Quotable

I've read "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson about a billion times. I think it's funny, insightful and well written and I can always use more of that. It has a multitude of passages that I will happily read aloud to whomever is present, whether or not they are actually interested. I just came to this one and it does such a lovely job of summing up life as we know it in NA.

"The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder - its DNA - xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-hand turn lane. Then the growth will expand until runs up against its property lines.

In olden times, you'd wander down to Mom's Cafe for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn't recognize. If you did enough traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere.

But when a business man from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald's and no one will stare at him. He can order without looking at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald's is Home, condensed into a three-ring binder and xeroxed. "No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.

The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs and bungee jumping. They have parallel parked their bimbo boxes [minivans] in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrocks shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture."

And it's getting worse... my trip to China was largely full of the terrifying prospect of the largest culture in the world doing everything it can to "catch up" to America. Happily tossing chunks of its culture and most of its environment into the bin, just to make life "better". Now, I didn't live through the Cultural Revolution and I've never been a starving peasant, but why oh why can't any of these countries take advantage of a relatively clean slate to look for something innovative and better? It's just depressing.

Although I can't complain too much, since it's a trap that's hard to escape even when you know it's there. There aren't many places in the world where you can live comfortably without some kind of housing. And in Canada, a lean-to just don't cut it unless you're really into suffering. But housing takes money, which takes a job, which means buying into even more of the idiocy. With all of us locked into a "if I just work a little more, I'll have money for the things/activities/whatever that I want, but the more I work, the less time and energy I have for other things" mentality, it's no wonder that the race is getting exponentially weirder.

Hah! Cheerful enough for you, David 3?